Henry Sanchez was driving home from his three kids' back-to-school night at a nearby school when he approached the intersection of Claremont and Glenview.

He looked through the windshield where just a few blocks ahead of him a flash of flame crossed the sky, followed by a deafening explosion.

His three kids were at home doing homework - and located directly on the other side of the fireball, which seemed to reach 100 feet into the sky.

He took back roads to avoid the geyser of fire, and found his kids outside on the street.

"They were terrified," he said.

I bet. On September 8th, CNN reported that an asteroid "narrowly missed Earth" and that another would come by but only graze us on the way. A few days earlier on September 6th, a giant fireball struck Colombia if you can believe their reports (I guess no one has emailed this to AC360 yet). The descriptions of the impact in Colombia are very similar to reports from San Bruno, where many residents used to the airport traffic and likely afraid of an inevitable crash into their roof one day thought a plane had crashed.

Here's another Chron report:

Julio Barajas, 34, who lives on Maple Avenue in San Bruno, was watering his lawn when he felt a vibration and immense shaking.

He saw a fireball rising about a mile from his home and promptly grabbed his children, ages 10, 8, 7 and 3, put them in the family van and drove away.

When he returned an hour later, the whole neighborhood was covered in ash, Barajas said.

I doubt Obama has gotten so horribly desperate to ditch excessive housing inventory that he has resorted to launching nukes to destroy some perfectly fine but overpriced and unable-to-move inventory so was it really lazy PG&E not keeping up their gas pipeline maintenance? I find that hard to digest.

I am not endorsing crackpot theories but a few things are suspicious about San Bruno if you ask me.

First, PG&E took almost immediate responsibility even though a full investigation into the explosion will take 12 - 18 months to complete. How many companies do you know that volunteer themselves like that? This is Bay Area real estate we are talking about, people, it's not Marin but still, PG&E is really going to have to jack up the SmartMeter scam if they're going to cover replacing those homes. Here's to hoping for PG&E's sake that some of them have been re-appraised since real estate tanked.

Second, it seemed to take PG&E the longest time to actually cut off the gas in the area. My experience, after 11 years in their jurisdiction, is that it's REALLY easy for them to cut the gas at any point in someone's house for whatever reason (maintenance, not bill paying issues) so it seemed weird that they were having such trouble with that. Paint me ignorant to the intricacies of Pacific Gas & Electric but, uh, isn't there, like, an Off Switch?

A huge fireball lit up the sky over San Bruno with a thunderous roar, and flames spread quickly across 10 acres of residential housing after dark. With electricity cut off, hundreds of evacuees fumbled their way to safety in the darkness, as firefighters arrived and worked through the night to try to save their homes.

Bob Pellegrini and his brother Ed fled from their home in time to see it destroyed by the flames, which also wrecked their four cars.

"It looked like hell on earth. I have never seen a ball of fire that huge," Bob Pellegrini told the San Jose Mercury News.

Know what would really distract people from realizing an asteroid just came down on their asses? A kook Pastor trying to burn Korans would work awesome, let's make sure to get the POTUS in on it.